“Nothing, nothing,” he said, spreading out his arms.
Tutu Max pushed by, giving Uncle Raz a shove as she passed. He fell backward, and then disappeared. I heard a plopping sound and ran to the edge of the pier. Uncle Raz popped up and reached for the truck tires that were lashed alongside the pier. Dad laughed and reached a hand down to help him.
Uncle Harley held his serious look through the whole thing.
“What’s going on here, Pearl honey?” Tutu Max asked.
“Nothing, Mama. I just coming down to walk on the pier with Daddy.”
“You know you have to take it easy, baby. You have to watch … ”
“S’okay, Mama. I just coming down to walk.”
Uncle Raz pulled himself up onto the pier and squatted down to squeeze the water from his clothes.
Uncle Harley said, “Okay, Mama. Hold tight and we’ll bring you down.”
“Wait a minute,” demanded Tutu Max. “What’s she standing on? Let me see. What if it breaks?”
Uncle Harley bent down and pulled the crowbar from under Aunty Pearl’s feet.
“I want to try it first, from down here,” Tutu Max said.
A very slight glance from Uncle Harley to his brothers laid out the whole turn of events. Dad lowered the chain. Uncle Raz stationed himself where he could take a peek at the scale. Uncle Harley placed the crowbar on the concrete and Tutu Max stepped onto it. Dad raised her a few inches off the ground. Uncle Raz glanced at the scale and lifted an eyebrow, but kept a straight face.
Tutu Max scowled at Uncle Harley. “Okay,” she said. Dad lowered her back to the pier. All this time Grampa Joe sat in the car with his door open.
With everyone offering assistance, we lowered Aunty Pearl to the pier, slowly, like the empress that she was.
It was about ten-thirty by the time we finally got her back home. Tutu Max went off with Grampa Joe to their place up the hill. Alii lumbered off the truck and headed straight for his mud hole.
Uncle Harley backed his truck up to the ramp, then climbed into the back and took Aunty Pearl’s hand. She stood and smiled down at Keo and me. I half-smiled back, then stared at the ground.
Aunty Pearl started chuckling in the warm glow of the lone yard light.
“Boys,” she said, and I looked back up at her. “Come to the house for a minute.”
I followed Keo, both of us walking slowly behind Uncle Harley and Aunty Pearl. Uncle Harley left us on the porch.
Aunty Pearl lowered herself onto her porch chair. “Boys,” she said, then paused to catch her breath. She laughed. “Boys, you look so sad.” She giggled again. “Go look in the cooler in the truck. Have a beer from it,” she said, then shooed us away with her hands.
Dad, Uncle Harley, and Uncle Raz stood along the fence, looking into Alii’s pen. Keo and I stopped at Uncle Harley’s truck and peeked into the cooler. Keo popped open a bottle with his thumb, the cap on loosely.
Water. Every beer bottle in the cooler was filled with water.
She knew—the whole time.
Uncle Harley was a lifetime smarter than Uncle Raz, and me, for that matter.
Dad motioned for me to come over next to him. Then we all turned to Uncle Raz, waiting: what did she weigh?
Uncle Raz scratched his chin, then rubbed the back of his neck, then looked down and kicked at the dirt. Sometimes he drove me crazy.
Finally, he said, “Maxine was two sixty-eight.” Then, in a low voice, added, “Pearl made three forty-seven.”
“Hah!” Uncle Harley said, slapping the fence. I wanted to go stand right up next to him, I felt so good. But I just stood there.
Uncle Raz rested on the fence, his arms on the top rail, staring into the pigpen.
“S’okay, Raz,” Uncle Harley said. “You can pay me tomorrow.” He tapped Dad’s back and winked at me.
Uncle Raz just kept on staring.
Alii snorted, then let out a long wheeze like a sigh.
Dad pushed himself away from the fence and started back to the truck. Uncle Raz and I followed.
A silky, clean offshore breeze rustled through the trees around the pigpen, and the metallic smell of nighttime coolness rose from the soil, and from the grass in the pastures. It had suddenly grown very quiet as islands at night seem to do. The three of us climbed into the front of Uncle Raz’s Toyota and inched away in first gear, silent as fish.
I turned and looked back. Keo was crouching beside his father at the pigpen fence. Uncle Harley reached down and scratched Alii’s ears, just like he scratched old Bullet’s.
Aunty Pearl was right about the Mendoza boys. If they grew up, they’d just get cranky.
Keo and I sat on the end of the pier on an old truck tire watching two huge sharks swim backward. When they got out about fifty or sixty feet they stopped dead in the water and stayed there, like two gray torpedoes frozen in place just under the surface of the ocean.
“Looks funny, yeah?” Keo said.
I shook my head. It was one of the strangest-looking things I’d ever seen.
The old man in the open fifteen-foot fishing skiff just off the end of the pier sat down again and waited for the sharks to return. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his torn khaki shirt.
“You think he’s ever seen a real shark?” Keo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Out in the skiff the old man fanned his face with his hat.
“Looks fake,” Keo said. “If that was a real shark he’d be a lot more worked up about it than that.”
“Yeah.”
“They should use real sharks, not those fake ones. Look.” He pointed to the underwater cables running from the two motionless sharks to the pier. “Everyone’s gonna know those are fake.”
The crowd behind us was pretty quiet, mostly because there was a man who kept telling everyone to please be quiet. Someone yelled out to the man in the boat. “Ready, Mr. Tracy?”
The old man raised his hand without looking up. He looked tired.
“Action!” the man on the pier shouted. The two sharks came to life and moved in along the cables to the skiff. The old man saw them coming and stood up “Ay! Galanos. Come on, gal-anosV he shouted.
The sharks closed in on the huge, half-eaten marlin tied to the port side of the skiff. It was one of three fake marlins that were kept in a fenced-in area on the pier. One was a complete marlin, and almost looked real. Another looked about one-third eaten away. The third one was about three-quarters eaten away.
The old man struck down on the sharks with the oar, hitting them hard, but not too hard because there was a man inside each of them, in scuba gear. When he beat down into the water with the oar it reminded me of Dad at work in a shower of exploding froth, pulling in a two-hundred-pound tuna on his handline and whacking the life out of it with a baseball bat.
“Looks too fake,” Keo said. He almost sounded sad.
Keo was a lot like Uncle Raz, pretty relaxed about things, but at the same time concerned about details, even if they weren’t very important. Something in him just seemed to grab on and start chewing.
“A real shark,” he went on, “would come up from under the fish and turn over to bite it. These just bump into it like canoes.”
“Cut!” the man in charge called. The people behind us clapped. The old man waved them off and sat back down in the skiff to fan his face again.
“We need to show him what a real shark looks like,” Keo said.
I watched the fake ones swim back out to their spot. The water was so clear I could see the bottom. It was hot and I felt like jumping in.
“Where could we get a shark to show him?”
“Uncle Raz could help us,” Keo said. “He knows everything there is to know about sharks.”
“Don’t you think he’s already got too much to do, now that he’s important?”
“All he has to do is show us the best place to find one.”
True, I thought. But the Optimystic, Uncle Raz’s boat, had
been hired by the movie people to take the film crew back and forth to the barge they had anchored a couple of miles out to sea. He was making sixty-eight dollars a day, so we pretty much left him alone until after dark.
The old man stood against the attacking fake sharks eight more times before he came back in to the pier.
That night Keo stayed over at my house so we could concentrate on how to catch a shark for the old man. Uncle Harley and Uncle Raz both came over for a while.
Keo and I went out to the rocks and sat as close to the ocean as we could without getting hit by the small rolling swells that passed for waves in a calm sea. Dad’s dogs chased black crabs into the water, and once in a while came over to stand next to us, keeping their eyes out for crabs, but wanting to be a part of what we were doing too.
“We need some horse meat,” Keo said, scratching a dog’s ear.
“Not easy,” I said. “Who do we know that has horse meat?”
“I don’t know, but I bet Grampa Joe does.”
When we went back to the house, Dad, Uncle Harley, and Uncle Raz were sitting outside on the wooden steps drinking beer. It was a peaceful sight, the three of them under the last rich stroke of orange sky slipping down off the island.
“Sixty box lunches,” Uncle Raz was saying. “I take sixty box lunches out there every day. Sheese! Somebody’s making some money at two fifty a box. And they got fifty-five hotel rooms!” Dad shook his head. It was pretty amazing all right.
“You going after a shark?” Uncle Harley asked.
“Ain’t got time,” Uncle Raz said. “Too busy.”
Keo and I perked up “What sharks?” I said.
Uncle Raz took a long swig of beer and winked at me. “Sonny’s going after ‘em,” he said, then laughed. Dad and Uncle Harley joined him. “Mr. Sturges wants sharks. Big ones. A hundred bucks if you can catch ‘em and keep ‘em alive.”
“Who’s Mr. Sturges?” Keo asked.
“The boss of the movies.”
Dad and Uncle Harley laughed again. Keo and I left. We had other things on our minds.
We decided that if we could get Grampa Joe to get us the horse meat, we’d fish for sharks down by Keahole point, where the ocean drops deep just off shore. The hundred-dollar reward, we figured, would draw attention to us, which meant we could get the old man’s attention. Then we could take him to see our shark and he’d know how to poke at the fake ones on the cables and make it look real. Keo was sure of it.
Luck was with us when we called Grampa Joe the next morning and told him our plan. Tutu Max had gone to Honolulu for the week. He was as talkative as I’d ever heard him, and happy, like someone who’d just caught a big ahi. “You boys give me two hours,” he said. Grampa Joe would do anything for Keo, his only grandson. And Keo was named after him, too, which made Keo as important as King Kalakaua in Grampa Joe’s eyes.
Grampa Joe got the meat and drove it down to the pier by three o’clock. He was all right, Grampa Joe. He even whispered when he told us the horse meat was in the trunk, like he was glad to be in on our secret plan. “A half a side of horse,” he said. But actually it was more the size of a life preserver.
Dad, as usual, was out on his sampan, fishing for tuna. I swam out to his mooring and brought his skiff back in. We didn’t have much time because I’d have to get it back before six.
Grampa Joe carried the horse meat to the skiff. It was wrapped in newspaper and burlap and smelled pretty bad. “You boys aren’t the only ones fishing with horse meat today,” he said. “Augie told me they had to shoot two old plugs for shark bait. I didn’t tell him who I was getting it for. Don’t come back till you get one, eh?”
He turned and started to walk away, kind of grufflike. But that was just his way.
“Wait!” he called. “I forgot.” From the front seat of the car he pulled a white plastic five-gallon bucket with a top on it and brought it over to us. “Chum,” he said, lifting the lid. “Horse guts. Bring sharks like flies to shit.”
Keo took it into the skiff and Grampa Joe drove off. I kicked the engine over and took us out along the coast, north toward Keahoulu.
It took a half hour to get out to the point. We anchored in a small cove.
Because sharks like to feed at night we decided to rig a set line and leave it until morning. If we could hook one, our plan was to tow it back to the harbor, slowly, to keep it alive. Keo and I had spent hours gathering all the parts we needed for the trap Now all we had to do was set it.
I used an eight-inch hook made of hardened steel and connected it to about twenty feet of quarter-inch steel cable. Keo prepared the anchor and float. He dove to the bottom and wedged the clawlike anchor into a volcanic crevice so that it could endure the tug of a hooked sharL He then ran a nylon cord from the anchor to an orange float. I attached the bait line to the float line. Keo climbed back into the skiff.
The horse meat was wet and ripening. I set the hook into it firmly, yet allowing the barb freedom to do its job.
Keo opened the plastic bucket. “Yuck!”
The swirl of swishy intestines smelled like a three-day-old toad carcass. Perfect.
“It’s really too early,” I said. “We should be dumping this after dark.”
Keo agreed, but we had no choice. We had to chum then and hope that the murky mass attracted something. Keo dropped the guts overboard in pieces, and then dumped the red liquid in after it. The water turned brown. I threw the horse meat into the middle of it. The float bobbed, sank, and reappeared.
We came back the next day just before noon. The float was gone. We circled around the cove, searching for it, saying nothing. A hooked shark could easily be tugging at the line, keeping the float beneath the surface. Or the anchor could have given way. Or the shark could have eaten the float.
“There!” Keo called. He pointed down into the water off the starboard bow. A tiny orange shape wobbled through the blue, far below the skiff. I shut down the engine. The quiet left behind was huge, and my ears swelled to greet it.
“Dang it … ”I said, thinking aloud. “One of us is going to have to go down for it.”
We looked at each other and laughed. It was a situation, all right. Who in his right mind wanted to jump in and see what was down there? For all we knew there was a fifteen-foot tiger shark on the hook. And neither of us had thought to bring along a pair of fins or a face mask.
“Pull out your money,” Keo said. We solved all our dilemmas with coins. We each took three coins from our pockets and held them in our palms behind our backs. If I lost I’d have no choice. I shuffled two coins into one hand and kept one in the other. Keo reached out, fist tightly closed. I reached with the hand holding two coins.
“Six,” he said.
“Four,” I countered.
We both opened our hands and counted the coins. There were five. Keo smiled and looked me straight in the eye. We put our hands back and reshuffled the coins, each staring the other down. It wouldn’t have bothered Keo in the least to dive down and take a look around. But it bothered me plenty, and Keo knew it.
On the fourth try Keo won. He didn’t take his eyes off me, didn’t smile. I blinked, and moved to the side of the skiff. You’re not a baby anymore. Where did that come from? Another dream-memory, a mind shadow. Looking down into the water below the skiff made my stomach turn. I could almost feel the ocean gagging me.
The shrunken orange shape wobbled innocently, about twenty feet down, looking as easy to retrieve as a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool. I was a little comforted by knowing that sharks, especially tigers, got sort of nonchalant about getting themselves hooked. They had a why-fight-it attitude and just swam around with the hook in their mouth waiting for something to happen. But I also knew that their will to fight was not in the least diminished. Sharks don’t understand what it means to give up.
I hated going in without a face mask. Everything beyond a few feet was blurry. I paused just below the skiff and looked around, all the way around. No giant moving s
hapes. The float wasn’t as far down as it had appeared and I reached it in a matter of seconds. I pulled on it, and it gave.
I looked all the way around again. Nothing. Don’t worry. Uncle Raz said that sharks were like dogs, lots of them around but they don’t usually attack people. But not to worry wasn’t part of me. I was as tight as an opibi sucked onto a rock in the surf.
Then something swept over the shapes on the ocean floor, a shifting of patterns. My stomach moved in a wave, and I felt a deep chill run through me as if I’d drifted over a freshwater spring. A huge, dark mass rose from the coral below. Even with blurred vision I could see that we’d hooked a shark, and a big one.
I felt for an instant as though I had no energy in me, like in a nightmare when something’s after you and you can’t, get away fast enough.
The shape circled out. I had to move. I bad to.
I let go of the float and raced upward, clawing the water, my heart pounding.
“Pull me in!” I gasped as I broke the surface next to the skiff.
Keo grabbed my arm and the back of my shorts. I kicked and pulled, and rolled over the gunwale with visions of leaving a leg in the jaws of the shark.
“What is it?”
“We got one … shark … big shark … ”I caught my breath and started the engine. The float popped up I squeezed one hand around the throttle so Keo couldn’t see it shaking and gripped the side of the skiff with the other to hold my body still. Keo moved to the bow and lay on it with his arms outstretched and grabbed the float as we went by. I cut to neutral, still breathing hard.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We pull the anchor and take him home.”
It was a great plan—it just didn’t work. The anchor was so well wedged into the crevice that we couldn’t get it out again without diving down and removing it by hand. And neither of us was dumb enough to suggest the coins for that one.
“Okay,” Keo said after a minute or so of staring at me, and then into the water. “No problem. We’ll just bring the old man out here.”
I concentrated on calming my body. “How,” I asked, but really didn’t care. That I was out of the water was all that was on my mind.
Blue Skin of the Sea Page 4
